World Englishes in world religions

In the beginning was the Word. Often quoted, these opening words from the Gospel according to John nonetheless show that the relationship between language and religion goes beyond intimacy to identity. Whether this is taken as a specific moment in the theorization of one religion, the culmination of a particular line of thinking, or a more general truth about how humans grasp the essence of their existence, it is clear that language and religion depend on one another in both immediate and profound ways. To put it another way, linguists, philosophers, and theologians have a lot to talk about. How does language mediate our conception of the world, of what is true or essential? Is language a reliable guide to the world? How does it underpin belief? How does it enable a community to constitute itself in terms of shared beliefs? What do these beliefs require of language, and what does language require of these beliefs? Even the terms by which I frame these simple questions have been debated for centuries, and one hesitates to rush into the debate. Yet it is possible to say that, various religious and philosophical traditions have evolved according to particular views of language. Language needs to adopt particular forms and to be used in particular ways in order to serve the needs of individual religions. Sociolinguists will be interested in how language variation aligns with religion. How does the use of a language in a religious context bring about change in the language? How does it reveal or make use of language variation? What are the properties of religion as a sociolinguistic domain? What language ideologies do participants adhere to? In the course of its self-definition as a field of study, linguistics and even sociolinguistics may have for the most part left the domain of religion to the anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians. The obvious exception is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but the reception of this idea has been contentious within the field. It may be that religious language is seen as the prototype for highly standardized, writing-centred, and prescriptive language use, and would not appear to be a fruitful field for new approaches interested in the primacy of speech, and variation within the community. The growth of linguistics within the academic world came at a time when traditional religions were undergoing extensive restructuring and even decline in many English-speaking societies, especially in the Inner Circle. However, as sociolinguistics developed, attention was bound to come round to religion among other social domains. Within the field of world Englishes specifically, the Kachruvian conceptualization created a space for new ways of thinking about English as a world language. Understanding how English is nativized, or adapted by speakers to the uses and needs of immediate contexts across the globe, involves culture as part of those contexts. Culture, in turn, often